Simply one hell of a project!

So a while ago my friend was wanting a couple of Black Butler cosplays for may expo. I offered my services and then immediately flailed as I realised what an immense task I had just taken on! Two basically Victorian suits in 5 months, with a part time job, a social life, a TEFL course to complete and various other commissions!? AM I CRAZY!?!?!?!?!? The answer is yes, crazy busy! I managed to slip in a fitting at Hyper Japan in Feb but as my friend lives in London it wasn't possible to arrange to meet any other time!! These are the suits she wanted:

.......and......

                                         ...this Ciel.

I ended up making one of the patterns from scratch and using an authentic Victorian Men's coat pattern for the other. I'm quite happy that my first cosplay commissions were fun ones. It also made me sit down and watch the series. (I really enjoyed it! Now that I have a bit of free time I feel a Grell cosplay in the making...!)

These are my finished suits. I pretty happy with them, to say that I only had one fitting!

It's fun making garments form cartoons. The clothes are designed to look good and not adhere to construction rules. It's really interesting working out how to make the costumes. I hope I get to make more soon!!

I blame Claire and Michaela for this....

Look what is coming to me in the post........

..................!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All ears....

If any of you know me and our Leeds crew then you'll know about the Unicorns Vs Bears war that rages from meet to meet. I am all for Unicorns! Masively! They are clearly the best animal ever, fullstop, period. However, there have recently been a lot of 'eared' accessories floating around and unicorn ears just don't have the same 'cute' appeal as bear ears so for this one time, I sold out.
I have invested one of these....

.....from CuteCandyClouds on Etsy. I asked for yellow ribbons instead of turquoise on mine and was rewarded with a quick and positive reply form the owner Shelby Cloud.
It took about 2 weeks for my headband to arrive and when it did, it looked like this.....

.....cute, right? I have a business card, a handwritten receipt and a money-off voucher.
The actual headband looks like this.....

(Me, no make-up, it's early, excuse my face!)
I love it! It's soft and fastens with a yellow ribbon like I asked. Although it has been made to fasten under the chin I prefer fastening it under my hair at the back. I still need to experiment with  hairstyles that suit (I'm thinking big, messy pigtails!). SHelby was lovely to deal with and I would highly recommend her shop!
I'm sure it will be worn soon so I shall post a better picture once that happens!
In the mean time, to appease Karma, here is my favourite unicorn...

Sew and sew and sew....

So guilty pleasure for me last night after a busy bank holiday evening at work was reading behind-the-bows and I came across this......

....and it got me thinking. When I first started looking into Lolita my main source was the Fruits Fashion books and a lot of the stuff in there was hand-made. This seemed like an intrinsic part of loli to me and went so well with idea of the fashion itself. Since getting into Live Journal and making some awesome loli friends, Brands have started to take over my vision of loli and tbh I'm not cool with that.

I agree with this statement, to an extent. I don't own much brand because I can't afford it and there are only certain prints I'd be willing to blow £2-300 on anyway. So I think from now on I'm going to concentrate more on making my loli gear. A lot of my Lolita is hand-made anyway and although it's hard to find fabric as nice as Brand dresses that doesn't cost a fortune, there's decent enough prints out there if you know where to look.

So my mid-year resolution will be to stay away from the burando and make my own way in the frilly world.

(Can I just add that I'm not against brand!! Buy/wear what you want, I don't care! This is just for me!:) )